Forget veggie burgers and sausages. How about a nice appetising vegetable disc, quorn tube, soya slice or seitan slab? Those are a few of the names put forward in an EU proposal to ban the use of meat-related terms on vegetarian and vegan food labels.

The EU is following the lead of France, which last year passed an amendment to its Agriculture Bill prohibiting any product largely based on non-animal ingredients being labelled as sausage, burger or steak. In April, the EU’s agricultural committee voted overwhelmingly to ban meaty names for plant-based or lab-grown protein, although the proposal won’t become law until it’s approved by the European Commission and member states.

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But now the UK government is weighing up whether to recommend similar laws over here. On Wednesday, a House of Lords select committee invited representatives from the National Farmers’ Union, the Vegan Society, Vegetarian Society, Quorn Foods and Masterchef finalist Jackie Kearney, to discuss how the EU proposal would work in the UK.

“The content of food should be very clear from its name and clearly explained in the accompanying description. Better enforcement is needed to ensure the packaging, labelling and marketing of products does not mislead customers,” says Ruth Edge, chief food chain adviser at the National Farmers’ Union.

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Vegan campaign groups, however, sense in the proposal the shadowy presence of the meat industry, worried about the increasing number of people cutting down their meat intake and taking up ‘flexitarian’ diets. In 2018, the global alternative meat market clocked up sales of around £15.5 billion and the UK overtook Germany as the nation with the highest number of new vegan food products entering the market, according to the Mintel Global New Products Database. The number of vegans quadrupled from 150,000 to 600,000 between 2014 and 2018, and they now make up 1.16 per cent of the population.

Mark Banahan, campaigns and policy officer of The Vegan Society says: “There is absolutely no evidence that consumers are currently confused by long-standing commonly used terms like veggie sausage or vegan burger. It would actually create the very confusion that it purports to be addressing.”

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The meat substitute brand Quorn stressed that meat manufacturers are actually recognising the potential of the plant-based meat market and are investing in such products, which are not just popular with vegetarians and vegans but flexitarians that want to reduce their meat intake. One in three (34 per cent) of British meat-eaters reduced their meat intake in the six months leading up to July 2018 due to health, ethical or sustainability concerns, up from 28 per cent who had done so in 2017. “I don’t think, the need for this regulation is coming from the manufacturers,” says Geoff Bryant, technical director at Quorn.

And it’s not just meat alternatives that have attracted the ire of lawmakers. In June 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that plant-based products cannot be referred to by dairy names – ruling out soya yogurt and vegan cheese, although carving out exemptions for almond and coconut milk, as well as peanut butter.

But animal-free substitutes aren’t exactly the modern phenomenon that they’re sometimes presented as, says Malte Rödl, a researcher into meat analogues at the University of Manchester. Meat replacements go way back to the Victorian era, he says. “The veggie and nut roast came from the idea of wanting to replace meat, but still having something familiar,” he says.

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Banning meaty names could end up creating more confusion than change, says Rödl. “Meat alternatives have been so popular because they have the same shape [as meat] and define what you can do with it, how you cook it.” Rödl’s research focuses on the social and cultural context of meat-eating and how food manufacturers are using this to advertise their meat-free products. “Lots of adverts [revolve] around Christmas and barbecues and they very much reinforce the idea that meat is normal and a legitimate thing to eat on those occasions because that’s what you’ve always done,” he says.

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The EU ban would remove these immediate associations, he says, adding that because consumers know what to expect from meat it creates a sense of familiarity when they are looking to transition into a flexitarian, vegetarian, or vegan diet. In other words, it’s obvious that a veggie burger should be slapped in a bun and slathered in cheese, but a veggie disc might leave people a little more perplexed.

“When you think of a sausage you automatically think of other foods that come with it like chips or beans, or if you think of a burger you think about putting it on a bun and enjoying a barbecue,” says Quorn’s Bryant. He does not think a ban would bring positive change in the UK, but rather complicate the food manufacturing business, add unnecessary costs and could confuse consumers even more. “You would probably stop some consumers from making that conscious choice to switch to plant-based diets because they just don’t know what’s going on, whereas at the moment they are not confused,” he says.

There was a general consensus at the House of Lords hearing that terms like sausages and burgers were generic and well-established descriptions in the UK and not appropriate to legislate against, says Lord Robin Teverson who chaired the committee meeting. “But there is this area of specific cuts of meat where perhaps in the future, as the vegetarian and vegan sector becomes more sophisticated, there could be more confusion.”

So while the future of veggie burgers seems safe in the UK at least, seitan steaks or mycoprotein chops might not get off so easily. And while the new-elected incoming EU parliament could chose to derail the proposal, Teverson thinks that the future of meat alternatives in Europe will remain on shaky ground. “I suspect the [proposal] will not be allowed to die completely from the continental side,” he says.